Equestria Daily
Equestria Daily is a fansite dedicated to postings of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic fanfiction, pictures, & comics. The site is run with a blog-style interface by a dedicated team of several editors, and has been officially recognised by the show's production team as well as The Hub, the American children's network on which the show airs. History 23-year-old Arizonian college student Shaun Scotellaro established the website in January 2011 to collect fan fiction and news specific to the show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Scotellaro has explained that he believed the show needed a unified fan base at this critical time, as he and many other twenty- to thirty-year-old males had recently become supporters of the show – known as 'bronies' – and an overarching concern was that Hasbro, the copyright owners of the My Little Pony franchise, would not be authorising a second season. Towards the end of 2010, when the fan-following was still in its infancy and confined mostly to the /co/ and /b/ boards of English imageboard 4chan, all pony-related content was banned by a moderator who had had enough of the flame war that was being waged between those who enjoyed the show and those who did not. Posting a message containing the word 'pony' became a bannable offence, and this was the final stimulus that prompted Scotellaro to begin Equestria Daily. In addition, regarding video-gaming blogs Joystiq and Kotaku, Scotellaro has said in an FAQ post on his website that he "always wanted to either join one or run one himself." After its creation, the blog quickly gained attention from the fan community. Though Scotellaro ran it solely himself to start with, more and more fans began sending news and updates to him, and the workload increased. By the end of June 2011, the site's staff had been expanded to include two more blog editors and an 'interviewer/YouTube organiser', all drawn from the user base of dedicated blog followers. By this point, the website was garnering around 300,000 additional page views per day, and with the supplementary editors was managing to post a greater number of updates with increased frequency, though still primarily of fan fiction. Equestria Daily has also partially branched into other forms of media dissemination, currently possessing a Facebook page, YouTube account and Twitter account, though all updates are still hosted on the originally-established Blogger site. As of the beginning of October 2011, the site boasts over 50 million hits since its creation in January. Official response The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic production team at DHX Media Vancouver, as well as the network which broadcasts the show, The Hub, have both acknowledged the existence of the fan community, and have individually sent official material specifically to Equestria Daily. The Hub had a summer advertising campaign for the show based around a parody of Katy Perry's "California Gurls" called "Equestria Girls", and an extended promotional version of the song was sent to Scotellaro's blog for "our favorite Pony fans." Hasbro themselves sent a review copy of their interactive iOS storybook "Twilight Sparkle: Teacher for a Day" to Equestria Daily, and several key figures in the production team have done exclusive interviews for the website, including supervising director and current showrunner Jayson Thiessen and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic developer and creative director Lauren Faust. Emily Manuel of GlobalComment wrote that scanning the site for fan-created works got her through the long wait until the next season. Scotellaro was also briefly featured on an episode of NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! References